1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to linguistics equipment and systems, and more specifically, to systems, methods and computer products for evaluating the fluency of a person speaking a language other than the person's native tongue.
2. Description of Related Art
Fluency evaluation can be used to assess the competence and effectiveness of people whose jobs depend on spoken communications, for example, call center agents, sales associates, technical representatives, or others who converse with the public as part of their job. Conventional methods of fluency evaluation typically analyze the speaking style of a person to detect the types and frequency of filler-words and discourse-markers used by the person. The results of the fluency evaluation may then be used to provide appropriate feedback to the person—e.g., the call center agent—to improve the person's job performance. Automatic fluency evaluation can also be used to evaluate the speaking skills of students learning a second language. Learning the disfluency patterns can also aid in improving the speech patterns of automatic Text-To-Speech (TTS) systems, making them sound less mechanical and more like natural spoken conversation.
Previous work done in this area focused on detecting disfluencies in the speech recognition transcripts, and removing the disfluent text to make the speech transcripts more readable and/or easier to use for further natural language processing. Earlier techniques for spoken fluency evaluation do not capture the various dimensions of disfluencies.
Various embodiments of the invention address the shortcomings of conventional systems by automatically evaluating a person's spoken fluency and providing a score that quantifies the fluency of the speaker.